Playwright David Mamet continued his conversion to full-blown MAGA mouthpiece by tearing into Bill Maher for suggesting that the Jan. 6 riots were inspired by Donald Trump’s refusal to formally concede the presidency in 2020.
Mamet, who previously said Trump was the “best president since Abraham Lincoln,” was on Maher’s Club Random podcast Sunday when the conversation inevitably drifted to his well-documented swing to conservatism.
A particularly testy to-and-fro started about 10 minutes into the pod, when Maher made the point that Trump never conceded the 2020 election. The Glengarry Glen Ross writer suggested that Trump should not have to admit defeat if he had already literally lost.
Maher then brought up the Jan. 6 riots, which he claimed were “inspired” by Trump’s failure to yield. “How did he inspire people to riot?” Mamet asked.
“By not conceding the election!” Maher shot back.
“Oh, come on!” the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright lamented. “So, he didn’t say the words ‘I concede’ and that meant people rioted?”
“Yes!” Maher, a longtime Trump critic criticized for attending a White House dinner in March, responded emphatically. “What do you think January 6th was about?”
Mamet batted the question right back at the Real Time host, who responded: “It was about people who did not hear their leader say, as every other leader in this country has said after an election [loss], ‘OK, I lost. We welcome the new guy. We had disagreements, but now we’re all Americans….’ When Obama took over, George Bush stood next to him and said he wanted him to succeed, Trump didn’t do any of that.”
“OK, so what?” Mamet shrugged. Maher said: “So what?! It inspires half the country to not accept the basic democratic principle that when you lose you go away and become the loyal opposition.”
Mamet then went nuclear. Starting with flattery, he talked about his and Maher’s career arc, before delivering a knockout blow.
“You, like me, have built a career out of nothing except talent and a little bit of luck and a lot of hard work, but you’re full of s—t!” he said.
“I don’t understand when you say that he did not say the words ‘I concede,’ caused half the country, which you just said, to riot.”
Maher walked back on the “half of the country” bit and said the point he was trying to make is that millions of people, mainly Trump’s MAGA base, will refuse to accept future electoral results because of the current president’s refusal to accept his defeat five years ago.
Trump continues to claim that the election was “rigged” and that he was the rightful winner, not Joe Biden. “They rigged the election, and I became president,” he said as recently as March, during a White House press conference alongside Gianni Infantino, the president of soccer’s governing body, FIFA.
This is despite numerous court rulings rejecting claims of widespread voter fraud and affirming the legitimacy of the results.
In one of the first acts of his current presidency, Trump enacted a sweeping series of pardons and commutations for individuals involved in the Capitol riots.
Mamet has firmly planted his flag in the “rigged” camp. Despite his liberal upbringing, he affirmed a swing to the right by flirting with Trump’s claims during a 2022 interview with The Guardian.
“The idea that people are not going to steal elections is ignorance because people steal elections all the time. The question is: ‘What was the extent of the election rigging?’ I don’t know. But was it questionable? Yes,” he said.
Mamet added that “Trump did a great job as president” before being replaced by Joe Biden.
Earlier in Sunday’s bust-up with Maher, he said a phone call with Trump saw his flirtation turn to devotion. Maher pointed out that Mamet has become more emboldened in his MAGA views since a previous appearance on his show.
“You know what happened me the next morning?” Mamet explained. “I was on your show and you said ‘Are you implying that the election was stolen?’ and I was kind of iffy on it.”
He continued: “Next morning, 8 o’clock, the phone rings. Woman on the phone says ‘Mr Mamet, will you hold for the president?’ I said, ‘Wait a second, Biden’s calling me?’ It’s Trump! During the Biden administration.
“He says ‘David, it’s Donald Trump.’ I say ‘To what do I owe the honor?’ He said ‘I saw you on Bill Maher yesterday, you were great. But you wussed out on the question of the stolen election. And then he talked to me for like 20 minutes about how the election was stolen.”
“But it wasn’t,” Maher offered.
“Well, I think it was,” Mamet responded.
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